Operations Manual for Your Real Estate Business

In our last Atlanta Mastermind meeting, our main topic centered on creating an operations manual for our real estate business like the one described in the book “The E-Myth” by Michael Gerber. I know the first question you may be asking is “How in the heck can an Operations Manual help me in Real Estate”?

An operations manual is a method of writing down everything you do in your business in order to outline how your business operates. This is helpful in that eventually you can delegate tasks to other business associates and they have a manual to go by. The goal of the manual is to streamline your real estate business methods and delegate to others so that you can move on to work on larger issues (think of a business model like McDonald’s hamburgers and Domino’s Pizza). This method will help you to free up tasks that you are not good at (or do not want to do) and increase profitability as you go out to look for new real estate deals. No matter how busy you are, this is one task that will dramatically improve your business production.

Here are the general steps we talked about in our mastermind meeting, to set up an operations manual for our businesses.

Step 1: Write down all the things you do in your real estate business.

1. Answer phone calls from prospective tenants

2. Coordinate repairs

3. Look for future real estate deals

4. Collect rent checks

5. Coordinate evictions

6. Pay bills

7. Drive around and check on properties

8. Place classified ads on http://www.craigslist.com/ and other publications

9. Show apartments to potential tenants.

Step 2: Break the list down into different categories.

1. Marketing

2. Property Management

3. Repairs

4. Accounting

5. Legal-Evictions

6. Find Deals

Step 3: Each of those categories gets its own page, and your job is to copy all of the activities from Step 1 under the appropriate category headings.

Step 7: Add any forms, details, phone dialogues, or checklist that you may have to complete each action item.

The Operations Manual is one of the core building blocks for a support and training foundation as you build your business, and delegate tasks and authority to those that work with you. As your business grows and you hire more employees (or virtual assistant or sub-contractors), you will have an Operations Manual to let them know clearly how you do business and what is expected to get the job done.